Sparklines in your shell

github.com

48 points·luu··8 comments

Not to take away from this still being pretty awesome, but this was absolutely huge (for the time) on HN back at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3237478 :-) including plenty of rewrites in various languages.

This is a little bit of deja vu.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3237478 for thread on this nearly 2 years ago.

How is this front page? This is extremely old

Presumably it is new to user 'luu'

It makes me sad though, as cool as it is, because I see this bit map screen pretending to be a terminal and using font points to pretending to draw graphics.

How the heck does that happen? I get the whole "xterm is compatible with terminals" which was a big deal when I was new to programming but this is the freakin' 21st century and our interactive text widget can't just do graphics?

Somebody shoot xterm in the head and replace it with a VT340 emulator not a stupid VT100 emulator. Please.

A couple of things need to happen in the kernel first before the VT100 could be deprecated safely in favor of the later VTs. It all starts here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kmscon

Here is the thing, Kmscon would work just fine. Because the VT340 works perfectly well as a VT100 terminal. But when you want to do graphics on it, you send it ReGIS commands (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReGIS) and it draws lines and shapes and stuff like that. Hell even XTERM has a Tek4010 mode which is poorly supported at best. But ReGIS support, especially now that all the patents are expired, would be perfectly fine for this sort of thing.

Unicode is much fun in the shell. I'm using 🔴 to show non-zero exit codes in my prompt :)

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